Skin 'hears' with puffs of air

By William Atkins
Saturday, 28 November 2009 17:54

Science - Health

According to a Canadian study, the skin helps the ears to hear better when certain words produce puffs of air that impinge on the listener’s skin. Such research can help to produce better communication devices for the hearing impaired.


According to the article “Aero-tactile integration in speech perception” within the journal Nature (Nature 462, 502-504 (26 November 2009), doi:10.1038/nature08572), the skin senses particular sounds coming out of people’s mouths (like syllables such as “ta” and “pa”) because they produce tiny, inaudible puffs of air.

Its authors are Donald Derrick, of the Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; and Bryan Gick, of the University of British Columbia and, also, from Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.

Derrick and Gick studied twenty-two people with respect to how their speaking impacts liseners.

Specifically, they listened to audio recordings in an environment of background noise.

The researchers stated that syllables such as “da” and “ba” are pronounced without producing a puff of air from the speaker.

However when these syllables are pronounced and a puff of air is artificially directed toward the skin in unison with these syllables (with the use of a air compressor by the researchers), then the listener often perceives the syllable as being “ta” and “pa”.

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